Sep 21, 2016
On this week's podcast we're going back to the Spring for the last talk from our Science Festival programme. How do we know that DNA is a double-helix? Why is diamond beautiful but graphite is boring, when they are both made of carbon? Why are there no room-temperature superconductors? These are all questions from the field of materials physics, and their answers are what drive our understanding of everything from flexible computer screens, advanced drug delivery, and how powerful the next generation of iPhone will be.
This talk will look at the techniques that scientists use to look at materials on the atomic level, and how this knowledge helps us to better understand the materials we already know, so that we can dream up new materials to tackle the problems of the future.
Dr Andrew Princep grew up in Western Australia where he graduated from Curtin University of Western Australia with an Honours degree in Nanotechnology in 2008, before completing his PhD in Physics at UNSW Canberra in 2012 and finally taking up his current position as a Postdoc at Oxford University.